Poetry Reading: A Smile Split by the Stars

Featuring nourbeSe philip and DJ TAMIKA

Date & Time: 12 April, 8:00 pm
Location: Gallery 44 at 401 Richmond St W #120, Toronto, ON

Join us for a poetry reading with m. nourbeSe philip, continuing the conversation inspired by the exhibition. This special event invites philip to read her work, followed by a celebratory set from DJ TAMIKA. Together, poetry and sound will reverberate through the exhibition that is dedicated to philip’s writing, expanding and deepening the relationship between text, sound and space.

A Smile Split by the Stars is a collaborative narration of m. nourbeSe philip’s poem, Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones. Working within, across and beyond colonial lexicons—the installation reads philip’s poem through and as different audio-visual-textual moments of revolutionary intent, wherein Black girlhood and Black femininity are, a priori (‘from what is earlier’), re-coding the aesthetic promises of modernity.

Born in Tobago, nourbeSe philip is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, play-wright and independent scholar who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto where she practiced law for seven years before becoming a poet and writer. Among her published works are the seminal She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks; the speculative prose poem Looking for Livingston: An Odyssey of Silence; the young adult novel, Harriet’s Daughter; the play, Coups and Calypsos, and four collections of essays including her most recent collection, BlanK. Her book-length poem, Zong!, is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic, which explodes the legal archive as it re-lates to slavery.

Among her awards are numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, including the prestigious Chalmers Award (Ontario Arts Council), the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (Outstanding mid-career art-ist), as well as the Pushcart Prize (USA), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba), the Lawrence Foundation Prize (USA), the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Pub-lishing Award (Toronto), the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award for Children (Toronto). She has been a finalist for the Dora Award (Canada), the Na-tional Magazine Award (Canada) and the Max and Greta Abel Award for Multicultur-al Literature (Canada). Her fellowships include Guggenheim, McDowell, and Rockefel-ler (Bellagio). She is an awardee of both the YWCA Woman of Distinction (Arts) and the Elizabeth Fry Rebels for a Cause awards. She has been Writer-in-Residence at several universities and a guest at writers’ retreats. philip is the 2020 recipient of PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In 2020, she was made a Fellow of the Modern Language Association (MLA); in 2022, she was award-ed the Canada Council Molson Prize for Literature; in 2023, she was awarded an hon-ourary Doctor of Laws by Queen’s University, and in 2024 was the recipient of a Windham-Campbell Award in poetry.

Tamika Bernard is a movement coach and multidisciplinary creative hailing from New York City and currently based in Toronto. Her personal and professional practices are rooted in a holistic inclusion of identity and experience. She uses music, video and other digital media to promote alternate, creative approaches to movement.